Troy Senik: One nation, divided, ignoring each other

"America moves forward only when we do so together." That was the note that President Obama sounded in last week's State of the Union address. It's a pretty brassy message when you're a guy that's anathema to just under half the nation, with a substantial subsection therein thinking that you're the head of some sort of crypto-socialist vanguard. Obama could have proposed that we harvest unicorns as a new alternative fuel source and it would have seemed only slightly less plausible (I hesitate to note that in print given the Obama Energy Department's track record of having more grant money than sense).

You can't blame the guy, however. This is pure rock 'n' roll. When you've got people in the seats, you play the hits. The need for unity – and the rejection of the notion that there's a Red America and a Blue America – have been an Obama staple ever since the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National convention that elevated him to the national spotlight. In the same way that Rolling Stones fans still expect to hear "Satisfaction" even though they know that Mick Jagger now has the libido of a geriatric mule, everyone still expects the president to trot out "hope and change" despite the fact that even his supporters now realize it was just an elegant fiction.

A fiction, we should stipulate, and not a lie. All evidence points to the fact that the Obama of 2008 genuinely believed that George W. Bush was the source of the nation's political polarization. He had it exactly backwards. Bush was – just as Obama would become – the symbol of one half of that polarized nation. Both men are symptoms, not causes.

For real wisdom on the matter we ought to look to another former presidential candidate: John Edwards. Edwards was onto something with his campaign trail refrain that there were "two Americas." He just had the details wrong.

To hear Edwards tell it, we're living in a nation where everyone either owns a mansion or cleans one for a living. Now, to be fair, that's probably a pretty accurate rendering of John Edwards' social circles. For the rest of the nation, however, reality intrudes. Class warfare tends to fail the acid test of lived experience.

There are, however, real differences between the two Americas. One tends to be churchgoing, the other secular. One is more likely to have pets than children. One values free enterprise and entrepreneurialism. The other tends to see capitalism as a vehicle for the double homicide of labor and the environment. One sees guns as an instrument of violence. The other sees guns as an instrument for resisting violence.

Here's the problem with the "unity" mantra: The fact that these people conceive of the world in fundamentally different ways is a lot less crazy than the idea that some Washington wunderkind – no matter how elegant the crease in his trousers – is going to somehow bridge the gap between them. People who cluster around absolutes aren't much interested in meeting in the middle.

Luckily, the founding fathers engineered a solution: the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which reserves all powers not expressly delegated to the federal government to the states or the people. The 10th Amendment anticipated that different states would foster different cultures with different social norms – and thus should be given a wide lane to make their own rules. Seeing as it's the ultimate constitutional nod to diversity, you'd think it would be sacrosanct to liberals. Instead, it's generally reviled as an impediment to expanding Washington's power. To hear the radicals tell it, we're polarized at Civil War levels. But the more issues we handle at the state level, the more these problems evaporate. Want to live in a place with low taxes, restrained regulation, a strong pro-life culture and a gun policy that stops just short of compelling firearm ownership? Head to Texas. Want higher taxes, abortion on demand and a place where the water supply gets cut off if it threatens a bait fish? California's for you.

The more Washington gets out of the way, the more states have the freedom to foster societies than can live in blissful isolation from the pockets of the nation they consider alien. It may not be as warm and fuzzy as Barack Obama's image of a kumbaya America, but it has one pronounced advantage: it's actually achievable. What would really move America forward isn't some abstract vision of "unity." It'd be leaving each other well enough alone.

Bob Schieffer: Washington's Ineptitude

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